Long-term tendencies in technological creativity - a preference-based approach

Given the significance of technology in the course of socio-economic evolution, the driving forces behind the continuous accretion of technological knowledge deserve particular attention. This paper suggests a hypothesis about the motivational underpinnings of human technological creativity that is able to explain some long-term developments in human labor and technology. These motivational underpinnings are considered to being similar across human beings. They can therefore be assumed to imply some commonly shared elements of human preferences or wants. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005